Emilio Tadini was born in Milan in 1927. Although he also came to be recognised as an artist, Tadini read literature at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan.
It was through writing that Tadini began to make a name for himself in 1947, collaborating with the magazine Il Politecnico, for which he published La passione secondo Matteo. Tadini’s passion for writing and publishing never waned. From 1963 to 1993 he published four novels and a volume of poetry. In 1992 he began writing about art and literature for Corriere della Sera. In 1997 he became the lead writer and host of the programme Contesto on Tele+. From 2000 to 2001 he collaborated on the cultural output of the Swiss-Italian broadcaster RSI and with Rai, among others. During this period he also produced translations of major works of 19th and 20th century literature including Stendhal, Pound, Eliot, Céline and Faulkner for various Italian publishers.
His writing has won him a few awards of note: he received the Campiello Selection Prize for The long night in 1987 and the Rhegium Julii National Prize for The storm in 1993. The novel also went on to win the Bergamo Prize in 1994 before becoming a theatrical production at the Franco Parenti Theatre in Milan.
It was alongside his critical and literary work from the late 1950s onwards that Tadini began to paint. His painting developed in several cycles. His influences included English pop artists (namely Peter Blake, David Hockney and Allen Jones) and the painting of de Chirico and Picasso, which inspired increasingly refined tones and dream-like figurations. He drew on sources closer to home for more Fauvist, colourful influences, such as Valerio Adami.
Tadini’s first solo show was held at Galleria del Cavallino in Venice in 1961, followed by a group exhibition with Mario Schifano, Valerio Adami and Lucio Del Pezzo at the newly opened Studio Marconi in Milan in 1965. He was invited to appear at the Venice Biennale in 1978 and 1982. Rotonda della Besana in Milan held a large solo exhibition of his work in 1986. From the autumn of 1995 to the summer of 1996, major Tadini retrospectives were held in museums in Stralsund, Bochum and Darmstadt.
In 2001 his last ever retrospective was held at Palazzo Reale in Milan. Tadini passed away the following year, but his work never lost its resonance. In 2004, the Corriere della Sera Foundation organised a conference in his honour entitled Le figure, le cose at Palazzo Reale, which featured contributions by leading figures from the world of culture, art and journalism such as Ferruccio de Bortoli, Umberto Eco, Paolo Fabbri, Valerio Adami and Carlo Arturo Quintavalle. Eco, who was close to Tadini, described him as ‘A writer who paints and a painter who writes’. In spring 2005 Villa dei Cedri Museum in Bellinzona held a major posthumous retrospective of his work. In 2008 Francesco Tadini and Carmela Scalise opened a museum – Spazio Tadini – dedicated to his honour in Milan, a permanent exhibition featuring both artistic and literary works.
